On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:31:52 +0200, Göran Krampe <goran at krampe.se> wrote:

>Having spent last months working in a large Perl system I feel much 
>stronger about explicitness being a GOOD thing. More than once did I 
>find bugs in the codebase that was due to the fact that Perl tries "too 
>damn hard" to be smart.

>Sure, some smartness may be fine - but I tend to think these days that 
>one should be very careful when trying to guess what the developer wanted.

+1 and a little history.  Some 30 to 40 years ago IBM invented PL/1 (for
programming language one) PL/1 was very, very forgiving.  We use to joke
that you could feed a Fortran program into PL/1 and it would compile.  It
would come up with a bunch of error or warning messages and keep going
trying to guess what the programmer wanted until it had a program it could
run.  The resultant program wouldn't do what you wanted but it compiled and
ran.

If you paid attention to the messages, you probably knew the result wasn't
what you wanted but if you didn't, you could be in trouble.

Lou
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:Lou at Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com